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Talk:Kossuth (The War That Came Early)
Historical figures convo I thought for sure he'd be a historical, but he's not. W&E really yielded very few new ones, didn't it? Freud, Kaupitsch, Pilsudski, Alfonso XIII, and Christian X. We can do Lojas Kossuth based on this dude, if we really want, and we can do Bela Lugosi for much the same reason. :I had this thought as well. Most of the historicals who appear are the usual suspects: Adolf and the boys, FDR, Churchill, Uncle Joe. So while the book probably had its fair share, for the purposes of our project, it was slim pickings. We do have a few random ones over in HW, actually: Kun, a couple of the treacherous generals, Haig. ::Damned shame. Of course, by my count this is his fourteenth WWII novel (ItB, TtB, UtB, StB, ItPoME, DoI, EotB, RE, DttE, TG, IatD, MwIH, and HW being the others, and isn't it wonderful how incomprehensible that long list of acronyms would be to the uninitiated). There's also "The Last Article," "Ready for the Fatherland," "The Phantom Tolbukhin," "Joe Steele," "In This Season," "Must and Shall," "News From the Front". . . . It does make sense that the pool from which historicals can be drawn is starting to look a little picked over. (Me, I'd take that as a sign that it's time to start writing about other eras, but what do I know? It's not like anyone wants to read an alternate War of 1812 or a bunch of 17th century AHs, right?) :::I'm not sure how much of that is what HT thinks and how much of that is the publisher, but I still maintain my suspicions that publishers are quite content that no one does want alternate 1812 or 17th century AHs (except Baen, of course). ::::Well Flint's stuff sells quite well, so you'd think he'd attract some kind of copycat. Of course, when AH novelists get too experimental, you're just as liable to wind up with 1901 as you are Ring of Fire. Or The Years of Rice and Salt, which was . . . different, anyway. After all these years that's still all I can say for it. Turtle Fan 19:14, August 4, 2010 (UTC) ::::I've said it before, I would think that the current fashion for Tudor Era historical fiction would attract some AH attention. Then again, much of the currently fashionable Tudor Era hi fi is romance, which attracts a slightly different crowd. Turtle Fan 19:14, August 4, 2010 (UTC) ::Oh, we can do one on Hindenburg, I think. Sarah made an off-the-cuff remark that one of his final half-assed attempts to rein in the viper he'd clutched to his breast was to demand exemptions for Jewish veterans from some of the Nazi race laws. Think it's worth doing him? He's one of those like Atlee: I can't decide whether it's worse that we don't have him or that we have him but only because of a single insignificant comment. Turtle Fan 06:05, August 4, 2010 (UTC) :::I think some hotel in B&I changed its name to Hindenburg after the GW. So we have two slender comments. And we have Erich Ludendorff anyway, might has well have both. ::::We could also have another link in Hitler's succession box. Turtle Fan 19:14, August 4, 2010 (UTC) Spanish Soldiers Convo Also, I think we can certainly do a Soldiers of the Spanish Civil War now, obviously. We'd have a bunch of TWTPE people, Hemingway, Orwell. The question becomes whether we should make it an OTL/ATL split. There would be some historicals in the TWTPE category who would double-count. Sanjurjo, Franco, Milton, and the pilot plus Hemingway and Orwell make six, and there's clearly growth potential in future TWTPE installments. Unfortunately, I don't believe we have the names of anyone who fought in the TL-191 version, so the ATL category would be exclusively TWTPE. But that has more than enough characters and more than enough growth potential to be viable. :Let's go ahead and do OTL/ATL ab initio, save ourselves some time. TR 04:43, August 4, 2010 (UTC) ::All right. I'll do that tomorrow. Turtle Fan 06:05, August 4, 2010 (UTC) Finally, Weinberg was just a grunt, why was it that he went to a brigadier every time he had a complaint? There were no NCOs or junior officers? No wonder these fuckers lost in OTL. Turtle Fan 20:51, August 3, 2010 (UTC) :Communist egalitarianism for you, there. And while their command structure was certainly half-assed, I think the direct involvement of the Axis vs. the non-interference of the Western Allies certainly played its part. TR 04:43, August 4, 2010 (UTC) ::Oh, sure, I wasn't really blaming it on their retarded rank structure. I'm not sure you can even blame communism for that one, by the way: At one point, everyone in Mao's army held the rank of private, even the man himself. (A private who had other privates carry him around in a howdah for most of the Long March, but a private just the same.) Even they weren't this half-assed with it, though: The privates knew which other privates were above and below them in the chain of command. Of course, that was a real army, full of professionals and Whampoa graduates. The Internationals were . . . whomever. A wonder they were able to enforce totalitarian discipline on such a motley crew. Could they really have been as good at enforcing their orders as HT portays them? I don't know, I know very little about them. Turtle Fan 06:05, August 4, 2010 (UTC) :::And another German Head of State. TR 21:30, August 4, 2010 (UTC) ::::I assume you meant that to go up top? :::::I did. Tarnation. TR 21:58, August 4, 2010 (UTC) ::::I wonder what the Germans category is up to, numbers-wise. I haven't checked in a while, not since the glut (such as it is) of W&E articles started. We might have to start thinking about major landmark numbers for article creation there, like we did recently with Historical Figures. Turtle Fan 21:39, August 4, 2010 (UTC) :::::222. Still a ways to go before I'm inclined to get excited. TR 21:58, August 4, 2010 (UTC) Making It Up Oh, so Jezek does end with the Republicans then. Too bad. I know Carrasquel was just Demange with another flag strapped to his sleeve but I kinda grew more attachement to him, having a first name and a very very very little more phisical description and that. Plus, he noticeably wasn't part of the raid Delgadillo got caught in and Demange seemed on the point to leave the scene after Harcourt got promoted to machine gun commander, so I kinda assumed he was going to be Jezek's commander. Well, then, I think I'll have to admit that I honestly have no idea of what HT's plan for Spain are... if he isn't making it up as he goes along, of course... WastedTime 12:33, July 25, 2011 (UTC) :Yeah, he's making it up all right. I assumed he put it in there for something, but apparently not. I suspected it served no purpose once I'd read HW. Thing is, nothing served a purpose in HW. In W&E it looked like Spain was on the verge of a breakthrough; what it would look like I couldn't've guessed, but I expected something was going to happen. If it didn't happen in TBS, though, I doubt it ever will. Maybe he's just using the SCW story like one of those old cartoons that had a secondary cast of characters tell an unrelated story whenever they were taking a break from the main story: a Tennessee Tuxedo to the main story's Underdog. :Witness that HT's having the Spanish situation change, and then he changes it back to what it was before. He's done it with both the overarcing course of the war and the character arcs of the people in it. He's kind of done that with Japan, too: "Okay, let's see what would happen if they swung north into the Soviet Union instead of south into the Westerners' colonies. Take Vladivostok and . . . okay, well this is boring. Let's reverse it and have them do what they did in OTL after all." The difference is, though, that Japan's Medium Switch is affecting the rest of the war. Spain's just there to confuse and irritate the readers. Turtle Fan 19:31, July 25, 2011 (UTC) ::In a recent interview, HT admits that he only has a broad arc planned out when he begins a work. So, yes, he makes it up as he goes, although in the case of this series, I suspect that he knew that by book three, he was going to give us this "big switch". ::Spain may have been there simply to give readers something more than a dress rehearsal for OTL. Really, that's the only way I can make sense of it being a viable front. Although, having the Czechs head there did help bring Spain back into the overall war. TR 20:10, July 25, 2011 (UTC)